Talk:Non-photorealistic rendering

I have added more detailed information about various techniques within NPR to this page. It would be nice to expand the 3D section - I am not an expert in 3D or realtime NPR so I have left those for someone else to do. GillianSmith 14 December 2005

I added a section on the terminology dispute. I think this article could also use a list of films that have used NPR techniques. It would also be useful to include an image of one of Richard Estes or Chuck Close's paintings, to highlight the difference between CG photorealism and art-based photorealism. Or maybe it could just go in the photorealism article, and we can put a link here. Chaleur 04:23, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I have made some changes to this page: 1. Moved terminology section later in the article, since it's not of central importance. This section might also constitute "original research;" it might be tricky to find other articles that contain this information. I'm not sure it's fair to say that most NPR researchers "dislike" the term; although we're certainly unsatisfied with it. It's also dodgy to "NPR researchers" as a group. I changed the wording slightly for these reasons. 2. As requested above, I've added a preliminary list of films and video games that use NPR. These are taken from memory and I probably missed some importance. I deliberately omitted films that use toon shading (except for early ones) since it seems like every cartoon has some toon shading nowadays. I don't know what the first uses were, other than Technological Threat. 3. I've removed the following text from the article entirely:

The Artistic Process
The process of creating images using NPR is quite different from the normal artistic process, despite producing arguably similar results. Before creating a piece of art from a scene, the artist is likely to take into account:


 * a philosophical representation of the object: what sort of ideas they would like their art to convey, and what techniques to use to achieve their purpose
 * a physical representation of the object: its geometry, color, and relationship with surrounding objects

A computer is incapable of generating a philosophical representation of the object, so the user of the system must instead specify what sort of artistic technique they would like to use. A physical representation of the image is difficult to produce, but can be done automatically by a computer. NPR systems employ many techniques within the realm of image processing, especially edge detection and image segmentation, in an attempt to produce meaningful physical data during image preprocessing. My rationale is: (a) it's original research; I doubt that you can find a reputable publication detailing this, and certainly not two (b) I'm not sure what it means; I've never even heard the terminology "philosophical representation" before, and (c) I don't think it's generally true... it proposes a model of how "artists" (NPR users?) work that doesn't bear any obvious relation to reality. Aaronh 01:32, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

2D NPR
I am wondering whether "2D NPR" really is rendering. According to the wiki page about Rendering ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(computer_graphics) ), we can note that :


 * "the general challenges to overcome in producing a 2D image from a 3D representation stored in a scene file"
 * "Rendering is one of the major sub-topics of 3D computer graphics"

As such, 2D NPR is hardly rendering (and thus... hardly NPR) since it usually consists in taking 2D shapes or vector graphics descriptions to produce 2D images. A reference can be added to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics if necessary. 152.81.114.90 (talk) 13:59, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Additional Media examples - TV
As long as we're listing media examples, what about Television? Futurama has for some time used computer rendering of 3-D. And what about South Park, which has been done via computer since the second episode (somewhere on a commentary or making-of the creators mention South Park was done on the same machines as Jurassic Park)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.228.6.165 (talk) 02:52, 18 July 2011 (UTC)